Sammy Jankins wrote:Well if you think it's good satire, what can I say? You're about the best satirist since Darth J stopped posting. Maybe I'm missing something.
Well the biggest mistake we could make is let someone like Smoot make it about Ex-Mormons and deflect attention away from Mormon truth claims. Ex-Mormons could overall be the scum of the earth and it still wouldn't make Mormonism true.
I appreciate the compliment, Sammy. Although, I should have been more clear with my comment--my "thumbs up" was more of a superficial, gut reaction to the blog post as an attempt at humor. In my experience, believers are all too often lacking in humor (likely a function of their expansive list of sacred, off-limits subjects, in my opinion), so it's refreshing to see a humorous piece written from a believing perspective as sharply done as this was. I should also mention that I'm hesitant to criticize Smoot's post because, as a satirist myself, I'm hyper-sensitive about dismissing satire critical to my worldview while producing satire of others'. I guess I don't really feel qualified to draw the line between effective/ineffective satire since my instinct is to draw it such that mine is on the "good" side and Smoot's is on the "bad" side.
Kish and Gadiaton's comments ring true to me--as pure satire, the piece seems to miss the mark both in its object of ridicule and its intended audience. It also seems to offer a pretty hollow message. What's the takeaway here? Ex-Mormons are dumb? Ignorant? Lazy? As you pointed out, none of that has any relevance to what I imagine the larger point of such a piece would be in the mind of the author, i.e. that belief in Mormonism is valid.
So, yeah. I should put a big fat asterisk next to my applause for Smoot.